Top 10 Apps of 2015 for Faculty and Staff

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Staying up to date with work and your students is always important, especially over long breaks. Whether they allow for improved productivity, or simply let you organize your life better, these apps are the best ones released in 2015.

Work Productivity:

Life can get pretty busy around the holidays, and juggling work and spending time with friends and family can be hard. Having the ability to access your documents on-the-go is more important than ever this time of year. The ability to change hard copies of papers into PDF files can make grading them far easier, and Cam Scanner Pro (Android, iOS) will make scanning documents on your phone and sharing them via a cloud service like OneDrive, Dropbox, or Evernote fast and easy. To access those documents from your phone or tablet, faculty, staff, and students can download Microsoft365 for free (instructions here) for portable access to programs like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

For the Classroom:

Apps for educators are becoming more and more popular. These apps are revolutionizing how educators organize and utilize their classroom on the web. For getting ideas down and brainstorming lesson plans, MindMeister (Android, iOS) allows you to visualize your ideas and to organize them into maps and images and even collaborate with colleagues or students on projects. For note-taking organization, Evernote (Android, iOS) is the way to go. it allows for voice memos, photos, and important information for just about anything. If you’ve ever wanted to catch up on a new subject, or maybe refresh your knowledge of an old one, try Khan Academy (Android, iOS) with thousands of videos and explanations, you can easily learn new material or even post your own videos for others to view. If you’re looking to make your classroom more interactive, try Kahoot! (Android) While there isn’t an iOS app yet, all users can access Kahoot! via GetKahoot.

Leisure:

If you enjoy listening to Podcasts, Podcast Addict (Android, iOS) makes discovering and downloading new podcasts a much easier process. As LinkedIn becomes more popular, getting the mobile app will help keep you up to date. LinkedIn Connected (Android, iOS) will allow full access to your account while on the go. If you plan on travelling to an area with no internet access, Pocket (Android, iOS) will let you save webpages and  images for later viewing when you disconnect. If you simply want to download and listen to music, Google Play Music (Android, iOS) is one of the easiest ways of downloading and storing your music.

To read more about check out this article Best Apps for Education.